In research and diagnostic applications, it is often important to be able to isolate one or more types of particles of a sample. Isolation of target components in an efficient and high throughput manner can thus have a significant impact in healthcare applications, biological research, research in the food industry, and medical research. Components for isolation and extraction can include cells, proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and other particles commonly found in biological fluid, and in one example, efficient isolation of rare cancerous cells (e.g., circulating tumor cells) in a biological sample can be used to detect and/or diagnose cancer for a patient at an early stage where intervention is critical. There are several conventional setups used for particle isolation from samples, implementing techniques derived from one or more of: fluorescence activated sorting, magnetic sorting, filtration, electrophoretic separation, and other methods of separation. However, conventional particle isolation systems are typically inefficient, are not high-throughput, are labor intensive, are prone to user-error, and require large systems, necessitating a significant amount of training, and/or contributing to untrustworthy analyses. Conventional setups are also typically expensive to operate, from time, labor, and cost perspectives, which can provide limits upon the completeness of an analysis performed using such setups.
Thus, there is a need in the biological sample processing field to create an improved method and system for buoyant separation of target components of a sample. This invention provides such an improved method and system.